Car insurance Channel

What if your search investment could be managed as a profit center? A growing cadre of performance marketers are rethinking digital advertising basics like KPIs, budgets and customer journeys–all while driving maximum business value. We’re referring to this trend as "profit-driven marketing,” and we’ve been watching from the front row as they develop paid search strategies that ignore traditional efficiency metrics and chase the dollars to win more customers.

One of the central premises is the idea that sometimes marketers need to bid higher and spend more to make more. If the goal is to maximize profits, then an effective bidding strategy shouldn't be tied to a budget or cost per acquisition (CPA). For example, would you prefer an $80 CPA or a $90 CPA? The answer should be “it depends.” Perhaps the higher priced ad appears at the top of a search results page, bringing in more sales volume than the less expensive CPA unit. This would be a case where spending more means making more. The point is to stay completely focused on profit, and follow the consumers’ lead. They’ll show you what to bid for and when.

Learn the secrets of profit-driven marketing from the innovative advertisers that are succeeding with this strategy on Think with Google.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Starting today,  Call-to-Action overlays on promoted YouTube videos will have a new look and feel across both desktop and mobile. The two lines of accompanying text will be gone leaving a single line call-to-action, giving more real estate to video content. We’ll make this change automatically so you won’t need to make any changes to existing CTAs.

Here’s the expanded CTA for desktop and mobile:
And here is the collapsed CTA for desktop and mobile:
In addition to this visual makeover, CTA clicks will now be included within the “Clicks” and “CTR” reporting metrics in AdWords for video, enabling you to better quantify the total impact of this video interactivity feature.

We are also rolling out new reporting improvements in AdWords for video that many advertisers, large and small told us would be helpful, namely:

• Improved Column Sets: We’re adding View Rate by default for all sets and are grouping sets of metrics by insight topic (like Views, Audience, Branding or Conversions). This lets you see a snapshot of your campaign based on key objectives, as well as evaluate your overall campaign performance based on View Rate before diving deeper into individual targeting groups.
• Added Conversion Segmentations: You can now segment by conversion name and category, showing how your video campaigns are driving key conversion types.
• All Metrics Now Visible in the Videos Tab: now you can more easily optimize across your videos by seeing the entire set of metrics available in other tabs.

Head over to AdWords for video to take advantage of these new features today.

Posted by Avi Fein, Product Manager, YouTube

What if you could connect with shoppers at the exact moment they're ready to buy?

That's the idea behind in-market audiences a feature in the Google Display Network that we released last year.  With buying signals like sites visited, ads clicked, and recent conversions, you can connect  your ads with consumers who are actively researching or comparing products and services across the Google Display Network. In-market audiences is helping companies like Wayfair.com, America's second-largest retailer of homewares, and Toll Brothers, a luxury home building company, connect with qualified leads, at scale.
Wayfair is seeing up to 20% higher ad response rates with its in-market ads. "You're much more able to effectively find customers who are right on the cusp of purchasing,"  says Wayfair's senior business analyst,  Ben Young. "They've been through the consideration process, and they're really just looking for the perfect deal or the perfect place to place their order."

Toll Brothers reached in-market buyers in real estate and home-related segments such as “residential properties for sale,” “home décor,” and “home furnishings.” Result: they're achieving up to 50% lower CPAs, more leads, and a click-through rate (CTR) up to three times higher on remarketing ads. “One of our biggest challenges is qualification,” says Tim Bolle, online marketing manager at Toll Brothers. “When we learned about in-market audiences, it was a way to reach a more qualified audience of people actively searching for a home.”

In-market audiences is easy to add to your campaigns. It's found on the "Interests & Remarketing" tab in the Display section of AdWords. Advertisers can select in-market audiences in 14 different verticals across more than a dozen languages including Japanese, French, Spanish, and German, with more to come. To learn more, visit the AdWords help center.

Posted by Diya Jolly Product Manager, Google Display Network

As I’ve shared in the past, brands are starting to embrace digital in a big way, but there still remains one big hurdle to digital becoming the medium of choice for brands: measurement. This unsexy topic doesn’t win any awards at Cannes, but it is top of mind for marketers and we hear about it from our partners all the time. In fact, according a survey we conducted last year, only about half of marketers consider their current brand measurement metrics effective.

Our ultimate goal continues to be offering measurement for brands that is as meaningful as the click has become for performance-driven marketers. I’m incredibly excited to see this start to come to fruition across the industry. Today at the Digital Media Summit, I focused on one of our efforts I’m particularly excited about, Brand Lift.

Brand Lift
We started testing Brand Lift earlier this year as a way for marketers to measure their video and display campaigns against objectives like brand awareness and ad recall - in near-real time at significant scale. We’re gradually rolling out this feature across both YouTube and the Google Display Network. We’ve also improved Brand Lift: advertisers can now measure whether their ads drive greater interest in their brands, as indicated by increases in organic, brand-related searches on Google. Here are two examples of how brands have deployed Brand Lift in their campaigns:

eHealth
eHealth, the country’s largest health insurance marketplace, has traditionally been a direct response oriented advertiser, but wanted to try a brand-building display campaign. Through Brand Lift, they uncovered a 45% increase in branded searches and a 33% lift in all health insurance-related search terms for consumers who saw the eHealth display campaign.  Rather than having to wait until the campaign had completed to find out what drove results, eHealth was able to find out mid-flight, and as a result, expanded their display campaign.

Oscar Mayer
Oscar Mayer recently pushed the envelope from traditional CPG creative and debuted this funny, sophisticated ad to promote their bacon.  Brand Lift showed that this ad generated a 19% lift in brand awareness (notable because this brand is already well known) and 112% lift in ad recall among those who saw the ad.  Perhaps most amazing, searches for their brand increased more than 1000% and searches for their product went up 2000%. Not only did the data validate their bold and risky creative direction, but it also provided some invaluable insights.  For instance, lift in ad recall for women was twice as high as for men.  And, lift in brand awareness was more than ten times higher for 45-54 year olds than it was for 55-64 year olds.  Oscar Mayer was able to adjust their audience targeting and media strategy based on these insights in real time, while the campaign was still running.

The Road Ahead
Having spent my career in digital, working with brands, I’ve seen the barriers to digital branding fall down, one by one.  From audience scale and targeting, to creative freedom and flexibility, and now, the ability to measure and act on audience behaviors and campaign performance in near real-time - the needs of brands can finally be fully realized online.

Posted by Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising

In a constantly connected world, people rely on their mobile devices to engage with businesses on the go, at any time and from anywhere. From research to purchase, AdWords mobile click-to-call ads allow advertisers to connect with customers online in a relevant and meaningful way. In fact, over 40 million calls are made directly to businesses from Google ads each month and that number is growing.

In November 2013, we introduced calls as conversions in the US, UK, France and Germany. In recent weeks, calls as conversions launched in Spain and Australia; and we plan to expand to more countries in the coming year.

Introducing new call conversion settings

For many businesses, not all phone calls are valued the same. In the coming weeks, we’re launching new, flexible controls for mobile click-to-call ads to help drive the calls that are most valuable to your business.

• Value different calls, differently. Assign conversion values to different call conversion types to understand which keywords and ads are generating more valuable phone calls. For example, a local bank might assign more value to a 10-minute call about opening a new savings account than a 30-second call enquiring about branch hours.

• Maximize value, not just volume. Using Target ROAS, a flexible bid strategy, you can automatically maximize call conversion value across campaigns with auction-time bid adjustments that factor in signals like device, location and time of day. From our previous example, the local bank can now drive more phone calls that result in higher value conversions, like phone calls for new savings accounts during branch hours.

• Manage your call conversions. Align your call conversions with your business needs by customizing call conversion names, categories and conversion windows. The local bank can now report on phone calls for “Savings Accounts” and “Branch Hours” as different conversions right within AdWords.

These new call conversion settings are available in countries where Google forwarding numbers are available*. You can learn more about these new call conversion settings here.
Join us for a click-to-call Hangout On Air

Mobile click-to-call data is transforming businesses. In a newly published white paper, Marchex, a mobile advertising technology company, found that 20-30% of car rental calls resulted in a booking and that 15-22% of calls for hotels resulted in a reservation. For more insights and a live discussion on click-to-call best practices, please join us on June 10th at 10 am PST for a Hangout On Air. You can join the hangout here.

Please stay on the line…

Mobile devices inspire people to call businesses now more than ever before. As advertisers refine their mobile strategies to capture this growing opportunity, Google continues to innovate. In the next few months, we’ll introduce more, powerful tools to help you to understand better how phone calls are impacting your business.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Calls

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* US, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Australia

4 out of 5 consumers say they want search ads to be customized to their city, zip code or immediate surroundings.

That's one of the key findings to come from new research on local search conducted by Ipsos MediaCT and Purchased®. Google commissioned the research to find out more about consumers' local search behavior — that is, their behavior when they're trying to find things nearby. 5000+ participants were recruited based on their smartphone usage and purchase behavior, and voluntarily completed an online survey or logged their smartphone search and in-store activities via a mobile diary.

Here's what we learned: people expect search ads to be relevant to their context and location. If they search for "car rental" or "Mexican restaurant," they prefer ads that are customized to where they happen to be and that help them take the next steps in their shopping journey. Among the findings:

• Consumers search for local information from all kinds of places. On computers and tablets, those places can include home (76%), work (24%) and hotels or motels (18%). On smartphones, those places include home (53%), on the go (51%) and in stores and malls (41%). 

• More than 60% of consumers say they've used ads with location information like address, directions, phone number or a click-to-call button. And, more than 70% of consumers who have used location information in ads say that information is important.

• Consumers choose stores close to where they happen to be. 72% of consumers who searched for local information on their smartphone visited a store within 5 miles.

What does this mean for advertisers? In a constantly connected world, advertisers need to think not only about consumers’ intent, but also their context. Consumers are reaching out to brands whenever and wherever it's convenient for them. Many advertisers still run broad national ads when consumers really want ads that are customized to their city, zip code or immediate surroundings. It’s more important than ever for advertisers to have an ad strategy that accounts for consumers’ context and location.

There’s much more in our full report. Read it now at Think With Google.

Posted by Bao Lam, Performance Ads Product Marketing Manager

As people search for things on Google, advertisers target those searches, or queries, using keywords. The relationship between queries and keywords is at the heart of search advertising with AdWords.

Do you have the right strategies in place in your account to cultivate all of that potential demand?  Our new guide, Keywords to the Wise, details keyword best practices to take your account to the next level.

• Do you target the meaning of a user’s search, in addition to the language a user may or may not be using?
• Are your long tail keywords too long?
• What opportunities for expansion are you missing out on in your account?
• How diligent are you with your negative keywords, and do you understand the ways in which their matching behavior differs from positive keywords?

Download our latest best practices white paper -- Keywords to the Wise -- to ensure that you’ve got keyword coverage covered.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing